In fact, they'd most likely make it less fit by diverting the plant's energy into producing molecules irrelevant to life in the wild. The same would apply to microbes modified to break down toxic waste: once the waste is gone, the specialised enzymes become an unnecessary burden, and the engineered microbes should fade away. "There should be no risk," says James Tiedje, a leading microbial ecologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing. Of course, developers would have to check that the transgenes didn't help the microbes use some other, natural foodstuff, but that should be relatively easy to do.

It was a slow and wasteful process. Heating the pots required lots of costly fuel. And too much time was spent filling the pots, leaving them to cool between batches and scrubbing out the dregs that formed at the bottom. Coffey's still, patented in 1830, looked nothing like the traditional burnished copper pot. It consisted of two columns, the analyser and the rectifier, each divided into a series of chambers by a number of perforated plates. Cold wash was pumped in at the top of the rectifier and carried through the column in pipes bathed by the hot outgoing alcoholic vapour.

Far more than the country burns deliberately" rainforests on Earth (see "Scorched earth"). But for Whitehouse, the same insight - that coal fires could light forest fires - had practical consequences. In 1998 he began his first education programme, working with ecologists to figure out how to extinguish the fires. Together with local people they snuffed out 65 coal seam fires that had started that year. So far, that work appears to be standing them in good stead. Despite the influence of the weather system El Nino this year, which has dried the rainforest and led to an early start to the fire season in the western US and in Indonesia, Sungai Wain remains fire-free so far.